Appreciating the Medway Cottage Homes

Although there is no record of the actual level of interest in education my paternal grandparents might have had, in the long run it mattered little because my father was fortunate enough to have been received into the Chatham Workhouse at a tender age along with his baby sister. This wasn’t nearly as bad as it might sound and in fact it was not by any means his first experience of the place. Strictly speaking the term Workhouse had for several years been replaced by Poor Law Institution and although those entering had previously been known as Paupers they were now referred to by the more up to date and cutting edge term Poor Persons. None of this of course was of much interest to my four year old father.

His mother Kate displayed an enduring level of neglect that totally eclipsed the worst excesses of Old Nan Constant, her mothering being liberally peppered with police charges, prison sentences and accusations of prostitution. Her husband Charles had abandoned her because the two youngest of their eight children having been conceived whilst he was away at sea were unlikely to be his. The rest of his family, all living in the Medway area were supportive of this stance. By the time Kate came before the Stipendiary Magistrate at Chatham Police Court in November 1913 her mistreatment of the two children remaining in her care was described as the worst case of neglect the NSPCC had seen in a very long time. So shocking were the details they were widely reported in local newspapers and the children swiftly removed to the safety of what all the locals still called The Workhouse. Their mother was sentenced to six months hard labour. This turned out to be a very good outcome for Bernard Joseph who ended up in the long term care of the Medway Cottage Homes and was not to see his mother again for more than thirty years. Unfortunately all contact with his baby sister, Elizabeth Mary was also severed and it is not known what became of her although she may well have been adopted. Although when she learned of his history my mother was appalled by the fact that he had ended up in institutional care my father always considered it had been a stabilising influence in his life and very quickly came to believe that from an educational viewpoint Nellie and her sisters had been dealt a much worse hand overall.

The Cottage Homes in Pattens Lane, Chatham had been purpose built in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a small self-contained village in which seriously disadvantaged children lived in groups of ten to twenty each with a house mother, boys separately from girls. They had their own school on site together with a chapel, sports facilities and training workshops for metalwork and carpentry. All pupils learned to swim, there was opportunity to learn to play musical instruments and from time to time there were outings to Broadstairs and Southend funded by local church groups. It is unlikely that any of these opportunities would have ever been forthcoming under the chaotic maternal care of Kate Hendy.

Warm clothing and sturdy boots were provided along with an adequate supply of food which was generally plain except at Christmas. As they grew older obliging and hungry lads like Bernard Joseph Hendy volunteered as scullery assistants which meant that from time to time an extra bread and jam or pudding ration might be purloined. Any kitchen related duties would invariably afford the young worker such perks as sole charge of stale bread discarded from the Friday bread pudding making. This task came with instructions to break it into suitably sized pieces to be managed by the four, five and six year olds who were to distribute it to the evening gathering of squabbling pigeons. Not all of the bread reached the birds of course and the untidy assembly grew more raucous and clamorous by the minute as it disappeared into the mouths of the youngest boys. Bernard Joseph enjoyed the shiver of munificence as walked among them ensuring that each child had a portion of stale bread for dissemination. This was his quasi-family, these small children pseudo-siblings. He enjoyed his role as a virtual big brother and he quite liked his house mother.

Discipline at the Cottage Homes was definitely firm but if you kept your head down, as all sensible lads resolved to do, its worst excesses could be avoided. It was not wise to allow yourself to become a bed wetter or to draw undue attention with smart remarks that made other boys laugh because then you surely would find life could be unpleasant. It was also a good idea to pay attention to school work and offer to tidy classrooms. A helpful attitude meant you were invariably one of those allowed first choice of reading books and might even result in your name coming to the top of the list for visits to museums or to the Pantomime. Quite apart from that good behaviour earned you much coveted proper swimming lessons and meant that the small but regular fortnightly pocket money allowance was never reduced by fines that so plagued the miscreants. Life was by no means unpleasant for a boy who kept his wits about him and had learned to get by without a surfeit of parental love and affection in his life.

In fact the austere and disciplined learning environment with its over-abundance of books by Charles Dickens and classroom walls covered with maps of the world suited my father admirably. He never tired of examining those fortunate areas of the known world operating within the confines of the Great British Empire and he vowed that in the mysterious future he would travel widely. Over the years within the relative comfort of these predictable environs he learned rapidly and with ease, was always top in Mental Arithmetic, rarely made spelling mistakes and usually had his socks pulled up to his knees and his boots polished to perfection. For just over a decade he did not rub shoulders much with outside children, those described as Ordinary with mothers and fathers and real siblings neither did he appear to have any memory whatsoever of any of his birth family. For him they were good years.

He had got on as a Cottage Homes boy very well overall but nonetheless something happened to rupture this equanimity when he was thirteen or fourteen years old because it was then he damaged his unblemished record of excellent behaviour and ran away vowing never to return. Unfortunately he chose not to share the details of this most exciting story with me and if he did so with my mother she chose likewise. He set off apparently after lights out with a bread roll wrapped in a handkerchief and two shillings of laboriously saved pocket money. This was revealed to me by my brother after a great deal of genealogical research in more recent years and may or may not have been completely accurate. His aim had been to reach London and find a job, preferably as a motor cycle mechanic which was something he knew little about but was exceedingly keen to learn. How he made his way to the outer reaches of North London to a modest mock Tudor estate is not known but somehow or other he did. An over excited ten year old boy called Stephen Woodman, the only child and son of a ledger clerk, hid him in the garden shed at 29 Methuan Road, Edgware just beyond the neat rows of climbing beans for almost a week. He supplied him with food stolen from his unknowingly generous mother’s pantry and desperately wanted to join him on the next part of the adventure, promising to steal him a map of the area with perhaps clear indication of the way to Wales. It was whilst searching through his father’s possessions in near darkness late at night for such a map that he was discovered and unable to control his excitement any longer blurted out to his startled parents that there was a runaway boy in the shed.

And so it was that my father was returned to Chatham quite quickly to the disappointment of both boys. Young Stephen, greatly impressed by Bernard Joseph’s resolution and mettle stayed in touch with him for years afterwards, sending regular letters to the Cottage Homes and was eventually to be known to me and my brother as Uncle Steve. It wasn’t until after the death of my father that he revealed the story of how their relationship began.

When Bernard Joseph reached the obligatory age for leaving the care of the Homes a job was found for him at the cement works in Northfleet together with a relative to lodge with, traced apparently without undue problem. The first two weeks of his Board was to be financed by one of the funds established for the purpose. His older brother Walter Francis Hendy now married and living at 119 Waterdales was deemed a suitable landlord and my father moved in without delay sharing a room with several teenage nephews. It was then that he began to save for a motorbike and reclaim his heritage by embracing Catholicism.
The details of his progress through life over the next thirteen or fourteen years are unknown but on a Saturday evening in early 1939 he was taken by a group of motor cycle enthusiasts to The Jolly Farmers in Crayford where he met my mother and two of her sisters. By that time he was the proud owner of an Ariel Red Hunter cycle that boasted only one previous very careful owner. He was also a regular Sunday Mass attendee at St John the Evangelist Church in Gravesend. He was undeniably anxious at the age of twenty nine to settle down and create a family of his own. Nellie Constant, unmarried, demure and associated with the Right Church seemed ideal and in any case it was about time he was getting on with it.

Urged on by her sisters who all agreed marriage would be good for her and she was lucky to be asked at the great age of thirty-one my mother did not hesitate for long although she did have doubts. The main obstacle as far as she was concerned was that he wasn’t a patch on her Fred but Mag said she was bound to think that but she shouldn’t let it stand in the way of good sense. Her Fred would have wanted her to find somebody else after all these years and it could even be that he was looking down and had directed Bern her way. Nellie didn’t entirely agree with this considering it a fanciful notion but she didn’t argue too much either because when all was said and done he did seem a nice enough chap and nobody could accuse him of being a drinker for instance. A single pint once a week or perhaps two if really pushed was quite enough for him, nothing like Mag’s Harold or Maud’s George who both drank like fish. He didn’t use bad language either and if you only heard the language used by some that she didn’t care to name it would make your hair curl, it really would. So to be fair she could do a lot worse.

So her brother Edgar booked an available space with the priest at St Mary of the Crays for Monday 7th August at 11am, he and two Constant sisters agreeing to be witnesses. The fourth witness was a cousin from the Hendy side called Arthur May. My mother wore a cream satin dress and carried a spray of orange blossom and everybody said she looked a picture. Four of her sisters were bridesmaids in pale blue satin, Rose, Phyllis, Violet and Freda. She hadn’t really wanted to have Freda if the truth be known but Old Nan was adamant and Mag said don’t upset the apple cart, it never pays. Mag’s little Margaret was the flower girl and Maud’s Desmond was the page boy, both in cream with blue sashes and looking as if butter wouldn’t melt. To be fair little Margaret was always a well behaved child but Maud spoilt her kids rotten and Desmond could be a real tartar at times and if he was hers he would get what he deserved and that was a fact. That day, however, he was as good as gold. She had to admit it, she’d definitely enjoyed the ceremony and the fuss involved in the taking of photos and the wedding breakfast in the hall had been a real treat, everybody said so. It had been a most agreeable day though not the happiest in her life because that had been the day she and Poor Fred got engaged but nevertheless a good day. Everything had gone well all things considered and it was only the future that really concerned her.

At some stage in those early days of marriage she took courage and discussed with her new husband topics that perhaps she should have raised earlier. The most significant by far were her grave reservations regarding some aspects of Catholicism and she took pains to emphasise that she thought the teaching nuns to be particularly cruel and that she would be reluctant to release any future children into their care. A Roman Catholic wedding was one thing and was over and done with before you could say Jack Robinson and as Mag quite rightly pointed out, upsetting the apple cart would be foolish. On the other hand year after year in a religious school was quite a different matter. If that could be avoided by setting the cat among the pigeons then that was the way it had to be, apple cart or no apple cart.

How much heed my father actually paid to the revelations is completely lost but what is evident is that a great many altercations took place over the following years with regard to the Holy Catholic Church and exactly how my brother and I should be taking part in it. There would have undoubtedly been a great many more disagreements had the Second World War not intervened and deftly removed him from our lives for a number of years.

Our baptisms were problematical and the precise details of my own are a total mystery. The only aspect recalled by those present and now still living such as my cousin Margaret is that there was a last minute complete change of name announced by Nellie in unusually firm tones that brooked no argument, startling whoever was officiating and greatly embarrassing my father. My brother inexplicably was baptised at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Rosherville in an obvious act of complete defiance and again there was a name change, though this time less significant. As far as the schools we were to attend were concerned there of course eventuated even more disharmony. I was deftly enrolled in St Botolph’s before my father was demobbed from the army. Naturally enough he was later to retaliate and my brother was registered into St Joseph’s in Springhead Road when he was still only four years old. My mother, enraged and aghast was heard to complain to the aunts that he had done so Behind Her Back whilst she was gossiping with Grace Bennett one Friday afternoon. The only good thing about it was that it was on our doorstep and she was able to view what was going on in the playground from the garden gate. The moment one of those nuns laid a finger on her son she would be over there like greased lightning to clean them rotten.

Regular Church attendance heralded even more problems and once he returned to us my father bought me a Missal for Roman Catholic children and took me to Sunday Mass himself each week which I did not altogether enjoy. My mother sent me to the Methodist Chapel Sunday School in the afternoons which I quite liked because there were stories and orange juice and ginger biscuits and sometimes transfers to adorn hands and arms with. It would be fair to say I grew up under a surfeit of differing beliefs and learned always to be wary when discussing them. Those childhood Sundays of memory were never completely agreeable days. Even now Sunday is my least liked day of the week, the day where unpleasant pieces of the past live. Some of us have most liked days on the other hand, days that are far easier to pick from recall and examine. For my father they were probably those when he walked as a kind of older brother among his pseudo siblings supervising the casting of stale bread to gatherings of pigeons. They were good days and when in future years his new in-laws spoke in whispers about his mother, pitying him and saying he must have been a Poor Little Soul he could only wonder at their ignorance.

Working on Wokeness ......

Whilst idly watching Laurence Fox debate his recent fall from grace on a Utube clip I found myself unexpectedly gaining an insight into those horrendous aspects of societal justice that so plagued European history – the ritual Burning of Witches, and Heaven help us the worst excesses of the Holy Inquisition.

Liberating your locale of a pesky harpy might almost seem acceptable I suppose if her home cures for aches and pains failed to work and her cat developed a habit of digging up your beans and carrots. On the other hand if only the woke of yesteryear had stopped at Ducking because immolation seems extreme by anyone’s standards. I’m not saying anyone is promoting the burning of Mr Fox but he does seem to have got himself into some strife with his comments. He apparently accused someone who called him a White Privileged Male of making a racist comment. Honestly, at this rate he’ll be loitering alongside JK Rowling in no time at all. In the interim he seems to be losing work options by the week and I loved him as Sergeant Hathaway in the Lewis series. It’s just not totally fair on his fan base.

How we once dealt with witches is one thing but the Inquisition itself perhaps stood on a different level. The aim was a virtuous one, to ensure correct and decent thinking throughout society – to combat heresy in fact. In the twenty-first century we are infinitely more civilized and we have a better overall insight. In order for an Inquisition of any kind to succeed there has to be a group of people who believe that they are in the Right, and who want everyone else to toe the line or else! There has to be a dogma that must not under any circumstances be challenged and in any case it’s for the ultimate good isn’t it? If only they had gone about it in a more gentle fashion back then the lives of those like Italian philosopher and former Catholic priest Giordano Bruno might have been spared. According to reports of the time he was burned at the stake for stubbornly adhering to unorthodox beliefs– he maintained that the Earth was round, that the universe was infinite and that other solar systems existed! Ex priest Thomas Hitton, seized at Gravesend no less and subsequently charged with heresy and burned might well have escaped also if only he’d played his cards right. Even sleepy Gravesend and its environs didn’t dodge what was happening – it was rife.

You could say that Galileo had more sense than most accused and indeed he got off lightly when you think about it. His astonishingly distasteful suggestion that the Earth together with other planets actually circled the sun definitely ruffled feathers. An unacceptable idea to say the least and it put him on a trajectory towards conflict with the Judges of the Inquisition. He was lucky to escape with his life and spent his remaining years under house arrest. Not so Thomas More, an English lawyer and social philosopher who simply couldn’t curb his tongue on matters of the moment and met a most unpleasant end.

There have been times in the past when it simply wasn’t wise to raise your head above the parapet and at least at the time of the Inquisition there wasn’t Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook to worry about. You could say that the tools of repression are much more dangerously available now, the downfall of transgressors from Truth almost automatic. Every time you hit your computer keyboard you dice with how they who know better than you might react. And Laurence Fox has been foolhardy at the very least – I mean, he was live on TV – what an idiot!

At least he doesn’t have an actual Inquisition to deal with though. Apparently that ended after Napoleon conquered Spain and ordered it to be abolished though Ferdinand VII tried to reinstate it and was ultimately prevented from doing so by the French. Today avoiding transgression is much simpler and all we need to do is familiarize ourselves with the Right Way to Think. We need to keep our Wokeness up to date – I’m going to work hard on mine and I expect you all to do likewise!

A BIRD IN THE HAND

It would definitely be true to say that education was not high on the daily priority list for my grandparents on either side of the family. The lack of interest from certain corners of the Constants I have often somewhat flippantly documented and that frivolous attitude is in itself more than likely due to a fascination with the notion that anyone could care so little for that particular convention. However, as my brother was invariably at pains to point out, at the stage when our maternal grandmother should have been preparing her young daughters for regular school attendance the Act itself was still seen as a novel idea by a great many of the working class. Nevertheless, by the time the attention of the populace was fully occupied with the Home Front intricacies of the Great War it would be fair to say that the older Constants were at least nominally enrolled in the closest Roman Catholic School and at times when not needed for field work actually attended.

My mother in later years related a number of nightmare experiences she had during her school days largely involving the merciless brutality of various teaching nuns. It’s difficult to know how much exaggeration was involved but even if the tales were merely half true they indicate a level of cruelty that would be quite unacceptable today. According to her accounts she was caned for being absent from Sunday Mass, caned again for wearing grubby pinafores on Monday mornings and yet again for not reliably eating fish on Fridays. At seven and eight years of age she was not responsible for the family wash and definitely not put in charge of food shopping so she quite rightly felt that at times the punishments were uncalled for. She was particularly outraged by being addressed as Helen when her name was Nellie, her mother being unaware that this was a diminutive rather than a given name in the proper sense. When she tried to explain she was told she was being impertinent so she seethed with indignation instead. It’s more than likely of course that the ongoing persecutions had more to do with the fact that the entire Constant family was a thorn in the side of both School and Church rather than the particular wrongdoing of one of its small members. Whatever the reason the catalogue of misdemeanours was endless and the penalties over a number of years were severe. Quite the worst of which in her opinion was that of the occasion of the dying baby thrush.

She had a habit of regularly telling us that we must never ever hold a baby bird in our hands no matter how tempting that might be should we come across one that had fallen from the nest. The heat of our hands would undoubtedly kill it we were advised and that would lead not only to a great many tears but perhaps punishment as well and nobody wanted that. Eventually she related the anecdote concerning the particular baby thrush stumbled upon on her way to school one Monday morning in her grubby pinafore already worrying because she was late. And she was late because she had been the one called upon to help her mother with the newest baby born just a few days previously. How she foolishly stopped to examine the bird, wondering if there might be any way of returning it to its rightful place, how she unwisely picked it up and decided to take it with her, carefully sheltering it from wind and rain and running in triumph towards the ultimate good sense and perception of Sister Joseph. What a good, kind, pupil that greatly feared pedagogue would then see standing before her.

But by the time she arrived the week’s spelling list was starting – Piece, Niece, Achieve ….. i before e except after c and the woman’s startled short, sharp scream as she dropped the forlorn little bundle of feathers on the desk in front of her rang in my mother’s ears for many a long year. The sad little bird had already died, its demise coming about she was told on account of the hot and clumsy hands of a cruel eight year old. Slaughtered by the most disobedient and unruly student in the school, one who was known to regularly miss Sunday Mass and who ate meat rather than fish regardless of the day of the week. Now standing there in a pinafore that had not been washed for days she found herself responsible for the death of one of God’s creatures, slain in an untimely manner by the heat of her own callous hands. She was given three strokes of the cane on each of those iniquitous hands for their wickedness. When she tearfully related the story to her mother later that day she was advised she should have known better and that the punishment must have been deserved because the Blessed Sisters surely knew best. The baby thrush, however, proved hard to forget.

Unhappily not one of the Constant children of Maxim Road Crayford was able to take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by the new-fangled Education Act because their attendance was generally an ad hoc affair and their mother’s disinterest, tinged with fear, only compounded the problem. Nellie though always maintained that she was glad she learned to read, she enjoyed reading and did her very best to be present on Wednesday and Friday afternoons when there was a Silent Reading period. Perhaps even more surprisingly she revealed on more than one occasion a love of poetry, demonstrating that she still recalled verse after verse of The Forsaken Merman and Home Thoughts From Abroad though she was unsure as to the authorship of either. This predilection for the written word did little to protect her however from the school’s worst excesses of minor tortures and torments and she claimed that on Monday mornings when Father Carrol’s housekeeper needed help from the older girls in order to complete her duties she was invariably the one nominated to empty his chamber pot. Never finding it unused overnight she had to lift it carefully and negotiate the steep stairs to the floor below setting it down again in the kitchen with anxiety before opening the heavy door to the backyard where the evil looking contents could be finally emptied into the outside privy. Heaven forbid should there be any spills on the journey. Even Old Nan was to some extent affronted that one of her brood was so regularly selected to be responsible for the Reverend Father’s Piss Pot and said the housekeeper was a lazy trollop. She was never slighted enough though to open a debate with the woman because after all somebody had to get the job done because it would never do for the Reverend Father to find it unemptied the following night would it? Nellie should take a leaf out of Mag’s book and that was a fact!

Mag was always described as crafty, managing to dodge not only the most unpleasant duties such as those concerning the parish priest but also a lot of the other troubles at school that so often beset Nellie. It does seem that there were times when my mother went out of her way to court disaster and that there was a part of her that half enjoyed the attention gained by becoming the family whipping boy. At the same time, however, a growing abhorrence was inculcated within her for the Roman Catholic Church which eventually led to a firm determination to keep away from it as far as possible in the future. Wisely she did not share this stance widely within the family, taking part in the rites and occasions necessitated by births, deaths and marriages over the years without undue comment except on occasion to Mag. None of them had emerged as having more than the basic interest in religion that was necessary to still feel they had a stake in it, a right to identify themselves as part of it. All new babies were baptised in the first few months of life without incident and each went on to attend the nearest Roman Catholic school where luckily the new breed of teaching nuns proved to be less bitter and spiteful than their predecessors. By the 1930s it was not deemed quite as necessary for whole families to attend Sunday Mass on a regular basis. Good Catholic mothers after all were needed at home to prepare the roast lamb or beef, the various vegetables, the stewed fruit and custard and so for them once a month seemed to suffice to hold on to their rightful place in Catholicism as long as they went regularly to Confession. Children were just a little less likely to be cross examined about what they ate on Fridays and luckily the starched white pinafores of the Edwardian era had completely vanished.

It became relatively easy for Nellie to manage a reasonable silence over most matters pertaining to Faith even when her adored fiancé Poor Fred succumbed to TB and his family turned out to be Anglican; so peace and harmony could be maintained all round. That was a blessing because it was most unwise to deviate too widely from the opinions of the Constant family. In fact a year or two later when she was slowly recovering from Fred’s death she even told them she’d had no knowledge of where his family worshipped and it was something never broached for discussion. That was of course quite untrue but because her anguish and despair had been palpable they asked no further questions and instead they said she had suffered a Breakdown and diligently continued to feed her the pills the doctor prescribed.

It was a number of years before she met Bernard Joseph Hendy and he asked her to marry him, rather too early in their relationship as far as she was concerned and she wasn’t expecting it. She had no real intention of taking it seriously anyway because nobody would be able to replace Poor Fred. At thirty one years of age she was an Old Maid, firmly on the Shelf and resigned to remain so, living with her sister Mag and looking after the children while Mag worked shifts down at Vickers. Vickers-Armstrong was an organisation that even in the 1930s distinguished itself with its forward thinking attitude towards the employment of married women. They were of course on a pay scale considerably lower than the men but this was a time when women were quite accepting of discrimination. Feminism was well into the future except for a few of the fashionable and middle class, female liberation had yet to emerge and men had families to support. Mag was more than delighted to become a working woman and her Harold was more than proud of her.

It never became completely clear to Nellie’s future children why it was their mother had agreed to the ill-fated marriage proposal that resulted in their birth but perhaps she was urged to do so by her family. It was as clear as daylight that Mag would soon need that back bedroom for her growing family. It wasn’t really Right that little Margaret still slept in the same room as the two boys and they were of course now quite old enough to keep an eye on her and each other. These arguments if presented, which they probably were not, would have sounded quite specious. The Constants as they grew up had slept where and how they could, huddled together under tarpaulins in the corner of fields during the Spring and Summer so having a roof of any kind overhead was seen as a bonus, separating boys from girls an extravagance. The idea of any of them needing constant adult supervision once they could walk and talk would have caused merriment.

Whatever the dialogue was, somehow or other at the beginning of that summer in 1939 the church had been booked and with trepidation my mother knew that the time had arrived for a frank exchange of views regarding religion. Her future husband had revealed himself to be a Good Catholic and he had clearly been lulled into a false sense of security by the outward signs of similar commitment within the Iron Mill Lane homes he had visited. On Old Nan’s kitchen wall the Bleeding Heart of Jesus was flamboyantly displayed and elsewhere among the sisters little statuettes of the Virgin clothed in blue, some holding the infant Jesus in their arms sat on sideboards. The plethora of small children called Patricia or Michael or Veronica served to seal his overall approval. For a young Catholic man considering matrimony this seemed to be a family sufficiently devout for his future fellowship and association but of course he had made an error of judgement.